Replace everything unfortunately. Can't get much better than the E8400 on the LGA775 platform. You could upgrade the video card but it wouldn't do a whole lot unless you play stuff other than WoW, and even then it will eventually be bottlenecked by the P45 chipset and Core2.

Replace everything unfortunately. Can't get much better than the E8400 on the LGA775 platform. You could upgrade the video card but it wouldn't do a whole lot unless you play stuff other than WoW, and even then it will eventually be bottlenecked by the P45 chipset and Core2.

What would be worth replacing? I know that my Core2 is currently the best for its platform, even better than a few i3s. Would I have to go all the way to i7? I hear that quads aren't too functional when it comes to gaming.

Core i5 750s are pretty damn good, and the 4.0 WoW engine does seem to take advantage of quad cores. As for quad core in gaming in general, anything built on the Unreal Engine is generally pretty good at multicore. For WoW, your 260 is plenty, and I'm fairly certain you'll see the biggest difference in moving from Core2Duo to i5/i7.

The biggest single thing you can do to increase your performance in wow is to give it as much processor as possible. SO getting an i5 quadcore and overclocking it to 4+ghz will have the largest impact of wow performance.

Video is a Palit GTS450. Main display is a 24" full HD TV. Secondary display is an ACER 19" lcd at 1440x900.

Upgrade in this order of importance:
1) CPU - i5 or cheap i7 and OC the crap out of it (depending on your cooling)
2) RAM - DDR3 1333mhz (or 1600mhz, difference is minimal)
3) GPU - For best-value GTX460 or HD6850 is the next step up...but GTX260 is already a damn good card, if you only play WoW then there is little reason to upgrade.

2) and 3) will result in small fps gains, your CPU upgrade will give you the biggest boost.

And I'm probably pushing the limit here....but if you can afford one, grab a 60-90gb SSD. No fps gains but now that I finally have an SSD, I would rather jump off somewhere high than play WoW from a regular HDD again :S

This is going to sound rather facetious, but get a Mac Pro. I have one from before the latest update and it still runs it at max with at least 60 fps. Heck, if you ran WoW at minimum settings, you could get about 100-120 fps out of a MacBook Air.

This is going to sound rather facetious, but get a Mac Pro. I have one from before the latest update and it still runs it at max with at least 60 fps. Heck, if you ran WoW at minimum settings, you could get about 100-120 fps out of a MacBook Air.

If you run WoW at minimum settings you technically could also play on an Athlon XP 3200+ Barton with 1 gig of ram on a Radeon 9500 Pro too. For free. Assuming you don't mind looking through dumpsters.

No point buying LGA1156 or LGA1366 at this point when Sandy Bridge is coming in few months.

This is going to sound rather facetious, but get a Mac Pro. I have one from before the latest update and it still runs it at max with at least 60 fps. Heck, if you ran WoW at minimum settings, you could get about 100-120 fps out of a MacBook Air.

Lots of computers can run WoW at 60fps minimum in a wide open soloing environment. None (as of now) can do so in a 25-man raid environment.

And the best part is, Bulldozer will support socket AM3! That alone is making me invest in an M4A89TD Pro + Phenom II x6 (1090T Black) instead of an X58A-UD3R + i7 950
I've always wondered why Intel's being such a bitch with new CPUs and sockets that basically say "oh, still using last year's socket? too bad, gtfo"...very annoying...

Eh thanks for the help guys, but I'll probably just hold off. I already get 60 FPS in most zones with shadows on high/4x AA/view distance on high and everything else on good. The only thing that causes concerns are zones like Nagrand which I only get 40-50 FPS on, and it is really spikey at that. I was just worried that many Cataclysm zones would be graphically intensive.

The only thing that causes concerns are zones like Nagrand which I only get 40-50 FPS on, and it is really spikey at that. I was just worried that many Cataclysm zones would be graphically intensive.

They are. Well, not "intensive", but lets just say that Nagrand doesn't stand a chance vs Uldum.

Also remember that in the old world, view distance is limited to a value lower than what your own graphical settings may have been set to. With 4.0.3a this limit will be removed. That gives more to render with view distance set to high/ultra.

I was running a E8400 and AMD 4890 (XFX) GPU, with my CPU OC'd at 3.6GHz. Ran perfectly fine for me at Ultra, with shadows on low and I believe 2x multisampling (1920x1080). Not the "60 FPS mark" everywhere, but I never had choppy gameplay, always ran smooth for me

Lots of computers can run WoW at 60fps minimum in a wide open soloing environment. None (as of now) can do so in a 25-man raid environment.

I'm not saying that the MacBook will run it at 60fps. I'm saying it'll run between 100-120 fps, which, for what's essentially a netbook, is pretty good. I actually tried it in a 25-man setting and was getting 40-50 fps on average. While it's not what the OP was looking for, that's still ridiculous performance out of such a small machine that was intended for basically writing papers.